Reset
by Gerald Tarrant and Quicksilver
Summary: A walk through the mind of Trowa and it's a scary ride. Set in the Sainan no Kekka universe, this cyberpunk style piece shows 03's instinctive responses to stimuli...


_Gundam Wing is property of Sotsu Agency, Bandai Studios, and TV Asahi. Sainan no Kekka and all original characters and plot copyright 2000 by Quicksilver and Gerald Tarrant. Please ask permission before reposting._

  
**SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING**

SAINAN NO KEKKA  
Reset: Trowa

  
The nature of a self-destruct program is dual: to fulfill the user's command and to commit a final, irreversible act of desperate sacrifice.

Except, of course, that final act of sacrifice brings with it the implications of something precious lost, wasted, gone. Irreplaceable.

Vanished.

It's a faultless program that never goes wrong, so simple that its complexity is simplicity itself, a divine act of God that presses its finger upon the button and pushes and whispers in your ear that this is the end.

  
**int main() {**

  
I'd missed my flight to Geneva but it was no large concern. A minor setback. Something that could be taken care of. I had booked another ticket for the next day, as soon as possible. 

Even with the addition of a random, unforeseen variable, the program was still functioning. I could see it in my head, those numbers ticking away, the seconds counting down to the explosion. Just like Heero standing on the ramp of his Gundam, blue eyes cold as steel, thumb pushing inwards on the red button.

They would not stop me.

  
**int i=0;**

  
There was a feeling in the air when I got off the plane at the Swiss airport, the feeling which I could never define but was always tangible, like the scent of lions. There but unmoving, still but alert, menacing and defiant.

I knew I had to hurry.

I slipped past the airport guards, managing to avoid another baggage check on the way out. Got on the bus. I wasn't sure exactly where the base was, but I figured that if I took any bus away from the airport, it would land me somewhere better from which to judge my location. The guidebook that I snagged on the way out mentioned the base and gave generalized directions, but as unfamiliar as I was with the city, I would need more information.

The feeling stayed with me as I got off the bus at a crowded street corner, increasing as I glanced at the street signs around me. I was somewhere downtown, which was not where I needed to be. I looked at the map again. The base was southwest, about ten miles away from the center of the city. There was a bus route map next to the stop and I moved in front of it, searching.

Bus route 44 would put me about half a mile from the base. I could walk the rest of the way.

There was no time to lose.

The bus moved too slowly for me and I found myself staring out the window, mentally chafing at the leisurely pace with which the vehicle traveled. The digital clock read 1400 hours.

The bus slowed, stopped. I got off. It roared away in a cloud of smoke and I looked at the sun. Began to walk. The program was ticking with the ticking of a time bomb and I felt my muscles tense.

The ground rocked under me and I looked towards the southwest as a plume of smoke curled lazily towards the sky and the distant thunder of explosions reached my ears.

The program clicked into action.

  
**{ for (int i ; i >= 0 ; i++)**

  
The south gate was thick with smoke and my worries about how I would even get myself on to the base were unfounded. The smoke from smoke bombs had always disagreed with my lungs, but I choked back the coughing, pounding down the neatly paved sidewalk, noting how quiet the surrounding buildings were. Civilian establishments, whose owners had taken cover when the bombing had begun.

I knew it was a bombing. Not an exercise, not a random test, and not just any bombing. It wasn't an air to ground bombing, but from the size and shape of the smoke clouds, an incident instigated by green, desperate troops. If they could even be called troops.

I had been a terrorist once, and I knew the smell of that smoke, the surging of adrenaline in my veins as I moved in towards the target. But looking at this, it was amateur work. No seasoned veteran would be so careless.

I thanked whatever gods above that had given me at least this gift and prayed that I would make it in time. They had to be in there. There was nowhere else they could go.

The clock ticked away, counting the seconds.

  
**i=1, i=2, i=3**

  
The base front gates looked like they had been closed when the explosions hit them, reducing them to a mass of twisted metal. I threw myself behind a truck parked crookedly in the drive just as something flew over my head with a whistling noise and exploded behind me. I didn't waste time looking, simply rolled under the truck and came up with my gun in my hands, dashing towards the entrance. There was machine gun fire but I slipped inside with the screen of another detonation.

Step one complete.

I narrowed my eyes through the smoke, bringing up the map of the base inside my head with the efficiency of a mental computer system. Where would they keep people like me?

I thought of Quatre.

The housing section was straight ahead and it was a gamble, but better than nothing. I took two steps, stumbled over something and caught myself before I hit the pavement. I turned around in a combat crouch and realized that I had tripped over the body of a dead soldier. His neck was broken, head twisted grotesquely to the side. His right hand, severed neatly at the wrist, was still holding his gun.

There was no time to mourn the dead. I picked up the hand, wrested it free of the gun, placed it gently back on the ground next to the body.

I checked the gun. It had three rounds left. That had to be good enough.

  
**i=95, i=96, i=97**

  
The entrance to the building was dark and I froze by the sliding glass doors into the lobby, listening. I heard nothing, but the program did not lie. There was something there.

Following me? I was not sure.

I hesitated a moment, then decided it didn't matter. To my surprise, the doors were unlocked, opening without a sound as I ran swiftly through the lobby and down the left hand corridor. The eerie red light of the emergency generators bathed the hall in a murky twilight and all the doors to the rooms were closed. I tried one of the handles. Locked.

It had been evacuated. I hoped my friends were among them.

"Duo Maxwell!"

The shout came from close by and I froze, every fiber in my body tense, listening. I forced myself to relax, spinning around and retracing my steps. It had been a girl's voice, high, quavering, frightened. She would be dangerous.

Another few steps took me into the lobby, a few more put me at the entrance to the right hand corridor. I flattened myself against the wall, eased my head around the corner.

  
**i=404, i=405, i=406**

  
I saw Duo first, his long braid the only recognizable thing about him at this distance, because for some reason he wasn't wearing the priest outfit anymore. Facing him, her back to me, was the girl. She was short, with long violet hair, slightly disheveled, bits of dust and dirt clinging to her knee-length plum-colored skirt, white blouse, and flat walking shoes. Nice clothes, but functional. Functional for what?

She was holding a gun.

I raised the gun involuntarily, then checked myself, holding back and listening. Her voice was getting higher and more wavering with every word. She was scared. She had a gun. And she was going to use it.

"I may run," said Duo steadily. "I may hide, but I never lie." He held out one hand to her. There was pain in his voice, pain and truth.

The gun shook in the girl's hands. "My path has led me to you... you are my brother's murderer, and it's time I showed you the truth of that!"

Something flashed before my eyes, a pause in the program, a memory of an earlier time stored in database.

_You bastard! You killed my sister!_

I squeezed my eyes shut, but instead of erasing the memory, I saw Catherine, her image distorted and fuzzy on the screen of the old television.

_I hate war. There's no way that I'd condone any kind of war. But Trowa isn't me. He's a fighter. He saw what was needed to be done…Trowa didn't fight because he enjoyed fighting or killing. He fought because it was the right thing to do!_

So it doesn't matter then? The people you leave behind don't matter? 

It hurts. There's no way around that. But…if they really loved you…I think they'd understand, why you did it.

The voices multiplied in my head and I wrenched my eyes open, gasping silently, heard Duo's voice cut through the eerie silence.

"Ilene, I never was on the African continent during the war! I didn't go near that Academy!"

He was walking towards her. He would try to disarm her. A friend? Why would Duo be friends with a terrorist? Or was she a terrorist?

"It doesn't matter! You were a pilot! All of you are nothing but filthy murderers!"

"No, Ilene, we weren't. We were soldiers, just like your brother."

_Just like your brother…_

I swallowed. There was some drama going on here…some story that I had no way of knowing. I heard the seconds ticking away in my head, ticking down to Duo's death, and I knew I had to act. But instead I just watched her, my hand frozen, unable to move the gun.

  
**i=3428, i=3429, i=3430**

  
"Everyone lies!" the girl whispered shakily. 

"I don't," Duo said, quietly. 

"They LIE! There's no such thing as peace! People kill because they enjoy it!"

I saw the gun come up as if in slow motion, saw Duo's mouth open, saw him reach out his hand, his braid flying. I saw myself in Heavyarms, swinging the machine around to cut through the clouds of mobile suits that surrounded me. I saw Quatre bent over, clutching his chest in agony.

I saw Heero's thumb on the red button. I saw his eyes look into mine. I saw the resolve there.

And I saw that this would never work.

My program was flawed. That what I thought was perfect, simple, and unbreakable would never work. That the variables would keep on increasing into infinity, because there would be nothing to stop them.

And Duo would die.

I flung myself out from behind the wall, my finger on the trigger of my gun, and as I leapt into the hallway, she turned slightly, as if sensing something, I caught a glimpse of the curve of her cheek, the beautiful, artlike grace of a woman's body caught in vivid color. It was her, the stray variable, the one flaw in the program that would destroy everything.

Her head was moving, hair streaming, her eyes tracking desperately across the way. But I was too quick. Too fast. I was a professional, and she was only a girl. A variable run rampant, out of control. A program that needed to be reset.

  
**{ for (int i ; i= 0 ;)  
cout**

  
As I raised my gun one last time, her eyes locked onto mine and I stared into them, dark, empty pools of nothingness, void of all emotion.

Heero's eyes.

  
**i=0;**

  
A single teardrop rolled slowly down her cheek.

I fired.

  
**return 0 ; }**

  
_Link to information on the C++ programming language. For all you programmers out there, in case you didn't get the point of the story, yes I MEANT for that to be an infinite for loop. I'm not that stupid...Don't kill me ^^;;_

  
To _Mirage: Quatre_ | Back to Sainan no Kekka 


End file.
